Swazi Media Commentary: Swaziland Sugar Association

Showing posts with label Swaziland Sugar Association. Show all posts

Monday, 10 December 2018

COSATU to help evicted Swaziland sugar cane farmers regain control of land from King

Kenworthy News Media, 8 December 2018

The President of South African trade federation COSATU met with Swazi sugar cane farmers. She promised to help them regain control of their land from Swaziland’s absolute monarch King Mswati III, writes Kenworthy News Media.

COSATU President Zingiswa Losi met with sugar cane farmers from Vuvulane, Mafucula and Shewula in Manzini, Swaziland on Tuesday (4 December 2018). Here she got first-hand information on the ongoing evictions and harassment of the farmers by the Royal Swaziland Sugar Company and the Swaziland Sugar Association, both organisations controlled by King Mswati III.

According to Secretary General of the Media Workers Union of Swaziland, Sicelo Vilane, who was at the meeting, the COSATU President promised the farmers that her organisation will meet with the Trade Union Congress of Swaziland to look at how the farmers could be helped.

“She expressed and offered the solidarity of COSATU and the Southern African Trade Union Co-ordination Council to all the communities who are being subjected to such inhuman treatment”, Vilane says.

Democracy or sanctions
In September, Zingiswa Losi became COSATU’s first ever woman President unopposed. She serves on the ANC national executive committee, but lost out to Jessie Duarte in her bid to become the ANC’s deputy secretary-general last year.

She has advocated for democracy in Swaziland on several occasions as well as calling for economic sanctions against the small landlocked country. In 2012, she told South African newspapers that COSATU “shall be with you [Swaziland] however long it takes, wherever you are and however painful it feels”.

In 2011, Losi was arrested and deported from Swaziland during pro-democracy protests. At the time, COSATU condemned “in the strongest possible terms the brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Swaziland”.

Given land in 1963
Mpisi Dlamini, a leading member of the Vuvulane Farmers Association, told the COSATU President how he and hundreds of other farmers had been given their land in Vuvulane in 1963 by the Colonial (now Commonwealth) Development Corporation (CDC), says Sicelo Vilane.

“They had produced sugar cane which was milled by the Mhlume Sugar Mill until 1981 when CDC resolved to transfer the land ownership to them. CDC approached [King Mswati III’s father] King Sobhuza II to hand over the title deeds to the farmers, but unfortunately the king passed away before the process was finalised”, according to VIlane.

A few years later, the government had forced the farmers to sign a document that effectively handed over the rights to the land to a company controlled by the royal family. Swaziland’s High Court had ruled in their favour, Dlamini told Losi, but they didn’t get their land back because “the king has taken sides in the matter”.

Losi was also told about forceful evictions and forceful relocations of farmers in Vuvulane, Mafucula and Shewula.

Regular evictions
The Swazi government and Swaziland’s sugar corporations have been harassing, evicting and forcefully relocating sugar cane farmers for many years without compensation to make way for sugar-cane fields controlled by King Mswati.

In 2013 for example, Freedom House reported several “unlawful arrests and detentions carried out by the police” against sugar cane farmers in the Vuvulane area. “Police are increasing pressure on farmers resisting their unlawful evictions from land that they have occupied for generations”, Freedom House stated.

In February 2016, 22 Vuvulane farmers were evicted from lands that they and their families had tended since 1963 by Vuvulane Irrigated Farms and the Swaziland Sugar Corporation.

And an Amnesty International report from September described two cases of forced and unlawful evictions without warning: One in the Malkers, where 60 people were evicted in April, and one in Nokwane, where 180 people were evicted in October 2014.

According to the report, the government “failed to provide essential services to those affected by the forced eviction: food, potable water and sanitation, basic shelter and housing, appropriate clothing or means of livelihood”. The forced evictions were a symptom of “a deeper, underlying problem” that violates international and regional human rights law, Amnesty said.

The more recent evictions have happened amongst other things because the king and his mother wish to use land in Vuvulane to construct a new town, the sugar cane famers say.

‘Swazi gold’
Sugar – known in Swaziland as ‘Swazi gold’ – is Swaziland’s main export commodity. With a population of only 1.3 million people, Swaziland is the 4th largest sugar producer in Africa. Sugar production accounts for over half of Swaziland’s agricultural output and nearly one fifth of Swaziland’s GDP.

According to a 2016 report from the International Trade Union Confederation, Mswati uses sugar profits to sweeten his own life, leaving sugar-cane farmers and the majority of the population bitterly impoverished.

And a 2017 report by Danish solidarity organisation Afrika Kontakt revealed how smallholder growers are also left vulnerable by sugar price fluctuations and transport costs, as well as by the corruption and undermining of the fight for democracy, that EU-support for Swaziland’s sugar industry, healthcare and education systems allows.

Monday, 2 October 2017

SWAZI SUGAR WORKERS EXPLOITED

The Swaziland Sugar Association which has celebrated its 50^th anniversary misled the world when it congratulated itself but ignored the suffering of workers in the industry.

Sugar in Swaziland is controlled by the conglomerate Tibiyo TakaNgwane which is supposed to hold a number of business for the benefit of the Swazi people.

Tibiyo Managing Director Absalom Dlamini told a banquet that 16,000 people were employed in the sector and this was ‘one of the most remarkable accomplishments in the sector in the past 50 years’.

The Swazi Observer newspaper, which is also owned by Tibiyo, reported on Friday (29 September 2017), ‘He said the benefits have spilled over to indirect beneficiaries including spouses, children, parents and relatives of the people employed in the value chain.

‘Also, Dlamini said the sugar industry has made inroads in building capacity for many Swazis to take up highly specialised positions in the sector, including at leadership and other decision making levels.’

His remarks were far from the truth as a report published in 2016 by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) demonstrates.

The report called King Mswati’s Gold showed that the absolute monarch of Swaziland uses sugar profits to finance his own lavish lifestyle. Sugar cane production has brought about more human suffering than development in Swaziland. Many people have been evicted and the general conditions in the sugar industry are atrocious, the report concluded.

As Peter Kenworthy reported in October 2016, Swaziland’s main export commodity is sugar, the so-called ‘Swazi gold’. With a population of only 1.3 million people, Swaziland is nevertheless the 4th largest sugar producer in Africa. Sugar production accounts for almost 60 percent of Swaziland’s agricultural output and 18 percent of Swaziland’s GDP. The biggest market for Swazi sugar is the European Union (although the duty-free and quota-guaranteed access to the EU market will end in 2017).

According to Manqoba Nxumalo, who authored the report, one would therefore expect that the wealth generated from sugar sales would lead to improving living standards for the Swazi population.

‘But as our research was able to prove, it is only a feeding ranch for the royal family. Sugar has been the primary locomotive by which they have mutated from a backward aristocracy to a new comprador class,’ says Nxumalo.

According to the report, the problems all lead back to a 1973 royal decree that banned political parties, criminalized political activism and vested all power in the King, thereby transforming Swaziland from a thriving constitutional democracy to royal dictatorship.

The decree thus created an absolute monarchy that was able to use its control over Swaziland’s wealth through companies such as Tibiyo Taka Ngwane to control the nation, the report concludes.

King Mswati is the sole trustee of Tibiyo, which was initially created as a national trust. Today, however, ‘income from Tibiyo’s present worth around US$ 2 billion supports King Mswati … Like Mswati, Tibiyo is immune from taxation.

World sugar production has doubled in 30 years, and Mswati – who Forbes estimates has a personal wealth of around US$200 million – has become personally rich from Swazi sugar. The thousands of workers who produce the sugar, on the other hand, have seen little of this wealth.

King Mswati, as the sole trustee of Tibiyo, is both a head of state and a businessman unfairly competing with local and foreign businesses. The workers, who work in Tibiyo-aligned companies, on the other hand live in squalor and abhorring conditions, especially in the sugar industry.

King Mswati, and his father Sobhuza before him, have evicted and forcefully relocated villagers from their lands without compensation to make way for Tibiyo-controlled sugar-cane fields, the report says.

So being employed on one of the large-scale Tibiyo-owned farms as a returning seasonal worker or casual employee has become a necessary alternative to working one’s own fields, although it is a hard and accident-prone job where chemicals such as roundup used to destroy weeds also destroys the people employed to spray the weeds.

According to the report, casual employees make an average of US$5.32 per day – hardly enough to pay for school fees for their children or, proper food or medicine – and are not paid for overtime. They also receive no pension benefits or medical aid.

As unemployment levels in Swaziland are over 40 percent, and the alternative to a job is poverty and often starvation, many Swazis do not complain.

But sugar cane farmers in the impoverished area of Vuvulane have decided that enough is enough. According to the report, there is an ongoing battle between sugar cane farmers in the area and the Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation.

In February 2016, 22 Vuvulane farmers were evicted from lands that they and their families had tended since 1963 by Vuvulane Irrigated Farms and the Swaziland Sugar Corporation.

Such forced evictions have led to farmers storming Tiboyo-run farms, in an attempt to ensure their livelihoods and the burning of vast areas of Tibiyo-run sugar cane fields in connection with another round of evictions.

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Monday, 10 December 2018

COSATU to help evicted Swaziland sugar cane farmers regain control of land from King

Monday, 2 October 2017

SWAZI SUGAR WORKERS EXPLOITED